The Caucasian Oak of Vestre Kirkegard

This is two trees. Below the join it is a Danish pedunculate oak, planted as rootstock. Above it is a Caucasian oak from the mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian, grafted on, which is how a nursery propagates an oak that will not come true from seed. The join shows, and it makes the tree hard to measure. The register gives 2.98 metres of girth, which is the clear stem. At chest height the tape runs through a cluster of low shoot pads around the graft, and across those the figure is closer to 4.0 metres. Both numbers are true of the same tree. They are measuring different parts of a lumpy problem, and we use the smaller one. Above all that the tree is straightforward: 20.5 metres tall, full-crowned, standing in section I of Vestre Kirkegard. Wonderful Copenhagen's own botanical map of the cemetery marks it as tree number two, which is a rarer distinction than it sounds; most trees on this list have a number from a register and from nobody else. Quercus macranthera carries big leaves, deeply lobed and felted grey underneath, nothing like the native oaks nearby. Nobody has dated this one. The cemetery opens at seven and closes at seven in winter and ten in summer, and Copenhagen uses it as a park, so there is no need to hurry.